Pro-animal experiment contingencies always site the development of insulin as
support for continued animal testing. They assert, with justification, that
without insulin harvested from slaughterhouses many diabetics would have lost
their lives. Whereas it is true that animals have figured largely in the history
of diabetic research and therapy, their use has not been necessary and
furthermore has not always advanced science.

Diabetes is a very serious disease, even today affecting ten to fourteen
million Americans. It is a leading cause of blindness, amputation, kidney
failure and premature death. Although the clinical signs of human diabetes have
been known since the first century AD, not until the late eighteenth century did
physicians associate the disease with characteristic changes in the pancreas
seen at autopsy. As this was difficult to reproduce in animals, many scientists
disputed the role of the pancreas in the disease.

Nearly a century later, in 1869, scientists identified insulin-producing
pancreatic cells that malfunction in diabetic patients. Other human pancreatic
conditions, such as pancreatic cancer and pancreatitis (inflammation of the
pancreas) were seen to produce diabetic symptoms, reinforcing the disease's link
with the pancreas.

Animal experimenters continued to interrupt the nicely progressing course of
knowledge regarding the pancreas and diabetes. When they removed pancreases from
dogs, cats, and pigs, sure enough, the animals did become diabetic. However, the
animals' symptoms led to conjecture that diabetes was a liver disease, linking
sugar transport to the liver and glycogen. These animal studies threw diabetes
research off track for many years.

In 1882, a physician named Dr. Marie noted the association between acromegaly,
a pituitary disorder, and sugar in the urine, thus connecting sugar metabolism
and the pituitary gland. Another doctor, Atkinson, published data in 1938 that
revealed 32.8 per cent of all acromegalic patients suffered from diabetes.
Bouchardat published similar findings in 1908. For some reason, the scientist
who reproduced this in dogs, Bernardo Houssay, ended up winning the Nobel Prize
in 1947. Obviously, it is hardly fair to say dogs were responsible for his
kudos, since knowledge predated Houssay's experiments and any number of
human-based methods would have produced the same findings.

In the early 1920s two scientists, John Macleod and Frederick Banting,
isolated insulin by extracting it from a dog. For this they received a Nobel
Prize. Macleod admitted that their contribution was not the discovery of
insulin, but rather reproducing in the dog lab what had already been
demonstrated in man. They were not obliged to extract insulin from dogs, because
certainly there was ample tissue from humans. They merely did so because it was
convenient. In that same year Banting and another experimenter, named Best, gave
dog insulin to a human patient with disastrous results. Note what scientists
said about the dog experiments in 1922,

The production of insulin originated in a wrongly conceived, wrongly
conducted, and wrongly interpreted series of experiments.

Banting, Best and other scientists modified the process using in vitro
techniques and later mass-produced insulin from pig and cow pancreases collected
at slaughterhouses.

In coming years scientists continued to refine the animal-derived substance.
Though it is true that beef and pork insulin saved lives, it also created an
allergic reaction in some patients. Beef insulin has three amino acids that
differ from human amino acids while pork insulin has only one. Whereas this
sounds negligible, it takes very little amino acid discrepancy to undermine
health. (Only one deviant amino acid is enough to produce certain life
threatening diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia.) Injecting
animal-derived insulin also presented the sizable danger of transmitting viruses
that cross from one species to another. Had researchers then recognized these
potentialities as well as the gulf of differences between humans and farm
animals, scientists would have hastened to develop human insulin more quickly.

The ability to treat patients suffering from diabetes without giving them
insulin injections was discovered by chance on humans. Today, the administration
of oral anti-hyperglycemics, which arose from serendipity and
self-experimentation, eliminates the need for insulin injections in many
patients.

Diabetes is still stunningly enigmatic, in large part due to our continued
reliance on the animal model. Most clinicians believe that strict glucose
control though insulin injections offers advantages over a less regimented
treatment plan. However, insulin is a treatment not a cure for diabetes. The
exact biochemical process through which insulin regulates blood sugar is not yet
known.

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